The Queer and the Bodily: Explorations of Power in Women's Visionary Writing in the Book of Margery Kempe

SUNY College Cortland Digital Commons @ Cortland Master's Theses 12-2014 The queer and the bodily: explorations of power in women's visionary writing in the Book of Margery Kempe Jayne Emerson Stacconi Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.cortland.edu/theses Part of the Fiction Commons, Gender and Sexuality Commons, History of Gender Commons, History of Religion Commons, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, Medieval History Commons, Medieval Studies Commons, Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Social History Commons, Women's History Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Stacconi, Jayne Emerson, "The queer and the bodily: explorations of power in women's visionary writing in the Book of Margery Kempe" (2014). Master's Theses. 33. https://digitalcommons.cortland.edu/theses/33 This Open Access Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Cortland. It has been accepted for inclusion in Master's Theses by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Cortland. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Hoffmann 1 The Queer and the Bodily: Explorations of Power in Women’s Visionary Writing in the Book of Margery Kempe by Jayne Stacconi A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Master of Arts in English Department of English, School of Arts and Sciences STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK COLLEGE AT CORTLAND December 2014 Hoffmann 2 Jayne Stacconi MA Thesis The Queer and The Bodily: Explorations of Power in Women’s Visionary Writing in The Book of Margery Kempe The provocative Book of Margery Kempe is a seminal text in the history of female authorship. Claiming to be the first written autobiography, The Book serves as a literary representation of womanhood during the late fourteenth to the fifteenth centuries when Margery was writing, and also speaks to circulating medieval discourses of religion, pilgrimage, and sexuality. Participating in medieval women’s visionary writing as a genre, Margery’s visionary power is a tool by which she is able to emancipate herself from the limiting roles of wife and mother. Additionally, by working within the conventions of visionary writing, Margery is able to exercise forms of private, public, and literary power that otherwise may have not been available to her as a woman in her historical milieu. By using queer theory to interpret The Book of Margery Kempe, Margery’s often challenging and subversive behavior is privileged as a method of critiquing boundaries of her role as a woman, her place within the Church’s hierarchy and the mediation of Christ’s desires, as well as the boundaries of an appropriate and acceptable sexuality. Thus, the queer in The Book of Margery Kempe reveals tensions in the text that contest dominant ideologies and values in the Middle Ages that are pertinent to the changing tides in institutionalized religion, women’s roles, and genre in the fourteenth century. Discourses of sexuality can reflect cultural values that are important to constructing and understanding a historical moment. In the essay “Michel Foucault, Homosexuality and the Middle Ages,” Ross Balzaretti discusses the problematic history of sexuality in the medieval queer. Using Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Balzaretti explains that that sexuality is culturally Hoffmann 3 kept private until it is made public by an outside pressure. During the Middle Ages, this pressure derives from the power of the Church, whose confession is an attempt to repress the body and bodily sexuality, and was likened to a torturous device as a means of establishing truth (Balzaretti 3). Because sexuality in the Middle Ages is private, attempting to inquire into hidden sexualities is a challenge to critics. However, the history of sexuality is presented as “not a history of morals, behavior, social practices...but rather the way in which desires, pleasures, and sexual behavior is problematized, reflected upon and conceived in relation to an art of living” (Balzaretti 2). In this statement, Balzaretti is constructing a methodology of attempting to understand sexuality not by its specificity, but rather how it complicates understandings of heteronormativity. Balzaretti’s article is important to understanding queer studies because it explains that a history of sexuality is a history of subversive behavior rather than a private homosexuality specifically. In The Book of Margery Kempe, Margery’s sexuality is problematized because it poses a clear and direct challenge to the Church authority, and Balzaretti’s Foucauldian dynamic of language and authority directly comments on Margery’s role within her cultural context, as Margery’s power is constructed through her verbal proclamation of her relationship with Christ and His teachings. The notion that the queer uncovers historical and cultural nuances that provides insight into larger discourses of sexuality, normativity, and gender boundaries is further explored in Amy Hollywood’s article “The Normal, the Queer, and the Middle Ages.” Hollywood states that “there is always [a]...never-perfect aspect of identification’ that engenders both historical difference (and at times pleasure in that difference) and ‘partial connections, queer relations” (173). In this statement, the importance between history and identification is yoked into a queer propinquity. Additionally, “new pieces of history…that queers can make new relations, new Hoffmann 4 identifications, new communities with past figures who elude resemblance to us but with whom we can be connected partially by virtue of shared marginality, queer positionality” (Hollywood 173). The potential for queer studies to create new opportunities for creating identity as well as an alternative historical perspective is significant to analyzing Margery Kempe’s position of authorship. Additionally, the concept of normalcy is important to establish in queer studies, and Hollywood defines it as “a kind of ideal, a position devoutly to be wished [that] marks a paradoxical shift from earlier conceptions of the ideal as impossible and unattainable”; it is a “dominating, hegemonic vision of what the human body should be” (175). Through Hollywood’s historical insight, it is first important to first note that the writing of The Book of Margery Kempe is a subversive act itself, for her book “is often considered the first extant autobiography written in English” (Kempe 604). However, although it is notable that arguably the first autobiography written in the English language is written by a woman, Kempe’s testimony doesn’t go uncontested, for her the writing of her autobiography is quickly problematized. As Kempe is illiterate, she employs two scribes to write her testimony, although the first scribe dies and her story is finished by the second. Of the twenty lines given to the history of the book’s transcription, Kempe is referred to twice as a “creature,” which nods towards Margery’s extraordinary relationship with Christ and as well as her abnormalcy (Kempe 606). The second priest, however, notices that the first transcription of Kempe’s book “was so badly written that he could do little with it, for it was neither good English nor German, and the letters were not shaped or formed as other letters are” (Kempe 606). This is significant to note because Kempe’s story was entirely illegible; in fact, it didn’t seem to be written in any kind of coherent language at all. The second scribe continues by saying that he “fully believed that no one would ever be able to read it, unless it were by special grace. Nevertheless, he promised her Hoffmann 5 that if he could read it he would with good will copy it out...better,” which suggests that Margery’s text is queer and challenging to scribal authority (Kempe 606). The introduction to the role of the scribes within The Book of Margery Kempe presents a few immediate problems with the narrative: first, Margery Kempe is named primarily as a creation of Christ, which also puts her in a direct and immediate relationship with Christ. Secondly, the transcription by the first scribe usurps Kempe’s attempt to preserve her narrative in textual form, which additionally is an usurpation of a queer history in order to preserve the dominant historical discourses in the fourteenth century. Lastly, Kempe is ultimately “saved” by an authoritative male figure who has the superlative power of not only writing Kempe’s story but has the insight to be able to rewrite her history— he can interpret foreign languages and create new narratives. The male scribes both attempt to try to write and rewrite Margery Kempe’s account, and in doing so, are attempting to maintain a heteronormative historical narrative; yet once again, Margery resists authority: “Then there was such ill spoken of this creature and of her weeping that the priest, out of cowardice, did not dare speak with her often, and would not write as he promised...And so he avoided and deferred the writing of this book…” (Kempe 606). Margery Kempe is referred to for the third time as a creature, and this time her non-normative behaviors, such as weeping, directly affect her history and her identity, as the scribe postpones his writing. Then something astounding happens: the scribe, in his fear of Margery Kempe’s queer potential, renounces his ability to translate the first scribe’s writing: “At last he said to her that he could not read it, and so he would not do it. He would not, he said, put himself in danger from it” (Kempe 606). The second scribe takes an additional step to relinquish Kempe’s story by encouraging her to seek a friend of the first scribe: “Then he advised her to go to a good man who had been well acquainted with the man who first wrote the book, on the supposition that he would be best able Hoffmann 6 to read the book” (Kempe 606).

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